Daniel
Joseph Fitzpatrick was only a couple of weeks short of his fourteenth birthday
when he took his own life.

His
17-year-old sister, Kristen, discovered him on August 11, hanged with his own
belt. His folks, Maureen and Daniel Sr. , were overpowered with pain but they
would not like to let that prevent them from sharing his important and
heartbreaking story. Daniel had been tenaciously harassed until he saw no other
way out.

The
teenager composed a multi-paged suicide take note of that his folks chose to
distribute. He depicts how his 6th grade classmates and previous friends at his
Catholic school abruptly betrayed him and how he had been subjected to every
day harassing assaults:

“…
Anthony took it all out on me. He bullied me along with John, Marco, Jose, and
Jack they did it constantly until I went into a fight with Anthony everyone
stopped except John he was angry… I ended up fighting John and got a fractured
pinkie,” Daniel, also known as Danny, wrote that they teased him because of his
weight, his grades, because he wasn’t as “tough” as the other boys. “I gave up.
The teachers either didn’t do ANYTHING.”

“My
son’s story is now out there for the world to see and for the world to know the
pain that he went through,” said Daniel’s father in a voice hoarse with emotion
in an 18-minute video he posted on Facebook. “No child should have to go
through what my son went through.” In the poignant recording, the mechanic also
explained the he and his wife didn’t feel the school treated their concerns
seriously when they took Danny’s troubles to the principal. “All I got was and
all HE got was, ‘He’ll be fine. Is he in counselling?

You
have to try harder, Danny. These things will pass.’”

Daniel
Sr. also had strong words for the parents of the boys Danny named in his
suicide note: “You get to hold your children every night and every day for the
rest of your lives and their natural lives. I don’t get that anymore. Your
little monsters took that from me. And my wife. And his sisters. Danny was a
kind, gentle little soul. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body… I just want
to hear him say, ‘good morning, dad’ one more time and that way I could tell
him ‘good morning’ and ‘I love you,’ which I did every every day.”

In
their deepest grief, Daniel Fitzgerald’s family hopes that with their decision
to publish his story, more attention will be directed to the problem of
bullying and its fatal consequences. Nothing can bring the 13-year-old back to
life. But if others open their ears to victims of bullying and support them,
perhaps other children can be saved from a similar fate.